About those mysterious R77.20 builds...

So, we all know and see those mysterious R77.20 builds uploaded lately and because I am "brave" enough I decided to give them a try:

1. Build 990172984 code named "private build"

Boots really slow! It actually reboots few times in a row until it finally gives up and ends with a peculiar message in /var/log/messages about configuring WiFi on a Wired appliance. Once it boots it works well until load average goes above 3.00 at which time either sfwd process will crash or cluster fail-over will happen. The interesting thing here is that R&D incorporated some kind of logic to interrupt endless reboots. Nice.

2. Build 990172993 code named "Private fix"

This one fixes the reboot-loop bug and is the first build ever that was able to survive 3.00+ load average test. The only problem is that above such load averages all site-to-site VPN tunnels die but this is more like side effect of the fact that they all run on the already overloaded core 0. This build is also pretty efficient in memory consumption. The only very minor issue I found is that it will sometime fail to connect to SNMP socket on boot.